posted at 7:21 pm on June 19, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The Obama administration is seriously struggling to come up with legal justifications for the risk-corridor program, even though ObamaCare didn’t include language appropriating any funds for the program? …So, what else is new?

The Department of Health and Human Services this week responded to a recent letter from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-AL) regarding the department’s legal authority to issue payments under the president’s health care law’s risk corridor program. Now, HHS argues that the risk corridor program would be considered a user fee in order to justify its authority to make payments under the program, but risk corridors were not listed as a user fee in President Obama’s own FY 2015 budget, released just a few months ago.

“Chalk up another executive fiat for this imperial presidency,” commented Upton. “This reversal underscores the administration’s disregard toward the law and Congress, and reveals its ‘whatever it takes’ and ‘whatever it costs’ effort to prop up this broken law.”

Sessions commented, “HHS now says that its entire legal authority to make risk corridor payments is predicated on the funds being treated as ‘user fees.’ But as recently as last year, the president’s budget deposited risk corridor payments into the Treasury general fund—conclusive proof that they are not user fees. HHS’ letter serves to confirm our suspicions.”

The very basic premise of the risk-corridor program is that insurers who ended up with a healthier, more profitable mix of insurees would then siphon some of those profits over to insurers who gleaned too many expensive enrollees to stay in the black, just for the first few years of the law until things stabilize — but if hardly any insurers are turning profits and the market doesn’t stabilize, the source of those breezily promised risk-corridor funds remains a murky legal mystery. Imagine that.

Blowback

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If these two clowns are really unhappy about the administration writing its own laws, then let them do something substantive about it. Until then, this is just wind. Really, they might just as well be ranting on HotAir for all the good they’ve done so far stopping this sort of anti-Constitutional behavior by the administration.

The ‘Risk Corridor’ payment scheme was always meant to fail – it just has come to the fore too soon. The One planned for his scheme to be so inculcated into society and popular, that the sheeple would wholeheartedly support anything that would keep it viable, especially if ‘others’ were paying for it.

Palin’s book, which was released the same year President Obama moved into the White House, sold approximately 496,000 copies in its first week of release, according to figures cited by the New York Times.

That’s almost half a million copies in one week.

In contrast, Clinton, with all her softball interviews and a massive amount of free publicity from an excited press, sold only 100,000 copies from its Tuesday release through Saturday, Politico reported.

Democrat persecutors are working overtime today. Esquire breathlessly claims they are after Christie and are threatening and old man with Parkinson’s, hoping he will testify that Christie told him to hold Sandy money back from Hoboken. The worm will turn, Democrats, with a vengeance.

We keep feigning surprise as Obama destroys any constitutional checks and balances that the American system was thought to have, and yet we do nothing. Any idiot knows that if you just talk about the problem and do nothing then why should the tyranny of those destroying the system change. They are literally getting away with murder (our Border services, our Ambassadors, and our soldiers). When will the Congress act?

The GOP cannot sunset risk corridor funding without winning the senate. With no future risk corridor slush fund, insurers will flee the exchanges.

Sun setting the risk corridor funding and attaching it to a debt ceiling increase is the simplest way to dismantle obamacare. The public is with the GOP at about 80 percent on both issues – debt increase and ins company bailout.

But we MUST have the senate first. This is why Reid and Obama are terrified of a GOP senate next year.